Pierre Menard, the Author of Don Quixote

To Silvina Ocampo

The visible body of work left by the novelist Pierre
Menard is easily and briefly listed. Inexcusable,
therefore, are the omissions and additions perpetrated
by Madame Henri Bachelier in a misleading
checklist which a certain newspaper that makes no
secret of its Protestant leanings has had the insensitivity
to thrust upon its unfortunate readers - few
and Calvinist though these be, when not Freemason
or circumcised. Menard's true friends looked on
this checklist with alarm and even a certain sadness.
Only yesterday, in a manner of speaking, did
we gather among the mournful cypresses at his
final resting place, and already Error creeps in to
blur his Memory. Unquestionably, some small rectification is in order.

It is all too easy, I realize, to challenge my meagre
credentials. Nevertheless, I trust that I shall
not be disallowed from citing the names of two
eminent patrons. The Baroness of Bacourt (at
whose unforgettable vendredis it was my privilege
to come to know the late-lamented poet) has been
kind enough to grant approval to the pages that
follow. The Countess of Bagnoreggio, one of the
most refined minds of the Principality of Monaco
(now of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, following her
recent marriage to the international philanthropist
Simon Kautzsch, a man much vilified, alas, by
the victims of his disinterested activities), has sacrificed
'to truth and to the death' (her own words)
the aristocratic reserve that so distinguishes her,
and in an open letter published in the review Luxe
she too grants me her approbation. These patents,
I believe, should suffice.

I have said that Menard's visible work is readily
listed. After careful examination of his private
papers, I find that they contain the following
items:

a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (the
second time with variants) in the review La Conque
(March and October, 1899).

b) A study of the feasibility of constructing a
poetic vocabulary of concepts that are neither synonyms
for nor circumlocutions of those that shape
our everyday speech 'but ideal objects created by
consensus and intended essentially for poetic needs'
(Nîmes, 1901).

c) A study of 'certain connections or affinities'
in the thinking of Descartes, Leibniz, and John
Wilkins (Nîmes, 1903).

d) A study of Leibniz's Characteristica Universalis (Nîmes, 1904).

e) A technical article on the possibility of enriching the game of chess by removing one of the rook's pawns. Menard sets forth his case, elaborates, argues, and in the end rejects his own innovation.

f) A study of Ramon Lull's Ars Magna Generalis (Nîmes, 1906).

g) A translation, with a foreword and notes, of The Book of the Free Invention and Art of the Game of Chess by Ruy López de Segura (Paris, 1907).

h) The draft pages of a monograph on George Boole's symbolic logic.

i) An examination of the basic metrical laws of French prose, illustrated with examples from Saint-Simon (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, October, 1909).

l) A foreword to the catalogue of an exhibition
of lithographs by Carolus Hourcade (Nîmes, 1914).

m)Problems with a Problem (Paris, 1917), a book
discussing in chronological order the solutions to
the well-known paradox of Achilles and the tortoise.
To date, two editions of this book have appeared;
the second bears in an epigraph Leibniz's advice,
'Have not the slightest fear, Mr Tortoise', and
amends the chapters on Russell and Descartes.

n) A dogged analysis of Toulet's 'syntactic usage'
(Nouvelle revue française, March, 1921). Menard, I
recall, held that censure and praise are sentimental
activities which have little or nothing to do with criticism.

p) An invective against Paul Valéry in Jacques
Reboul's Pages Towards the Suppression of Reality.
(This denunciation, if I may digress, is the exact
reverse of his true opinion of Valéry. Valéry knew
this, and the old friendship between the two men
was not imperilled.)

q) A 'definition' of the Countess of Bagnoreggio,
included in the 'triumphant tome' - the words of
another contributor, Gabriele D'Annunzio - published
annually by this lady for the purpose of correcting
the inevitable falsehoods of the gutter press and of presenting 'to the world and to Italy' a true
portrait of her person, so often exposed (by reason
of her beauty and conduct) to over-hasty misinterpretation.

r) An admirable crown of sonnets for the Baroness of Bacourt (1934).

s) A handwritten list of verses whose effect derives from their punctuation.*

The above, then, is a summary in chronological
order (omitting only a few woolly occasional sonnets
inscribed in Madame Henri Bachelier's hospitable,
or greedy, album) of Menard's visible work.
I shall now move on to his other work - the underground,
the infinitely heroic, the singular, and (oh,
the scope of the man!) the unfinished. This oeuvre,
possibly the most significant of our time, consists
of chapters nine and thirty-eight of the first part
of Don Quixote and of a fragment of chapter
twenty-two. I am aware that my claim will seem
an absurdity, but to vindicate this 'absurdity' is
the principle object of the present essay.**

Two texts of differing value inspired Menard's undertaking. One was that philological fragment
(number 2005 in the Dresden edition) in which
Novalis outlines the notion of total identification
with a particular author. The other was one of those
derivative books that place Christ on a boulevard,
Hamlet in the Cannebière, or don Quixote on Wall
Street. Like any man of good taste, Menard loathed
such pointless masquerades, since all they were fit
for, he said, was to amuse the man in the street
with anachronisms or, worse still, to bewitch us
with the infantile idea that every historical period
is the same or is different. What seemed to Menard
more interesting - albeit superficial and inconsistent
in execution - was Daudet's famous attempt to
combine in one character, Tartarin, both the Ingenious
Knight and his squire. Anyone who suggests
that Menard dedicated his life to writing a
modern-day Don Quixote defiles Menard's living
memory.

Pierre Menard was not out to write another Don
Quixote - which would have been easy - but
Don Quixote itself. Needless to add, he never envisaged
a mindless transcription of the original; it
was not his intention to copy it. His ambition, an
admirable one, was to produce a handful of pages that matched word for word and line for line those
of Miguel de Cervantes.

'Only my aim is astonishing,' he wrote to me
from Bayonne on the thirtieth of September, 1934.
'The final term, the conclusion, of a theological or
metaphysical proof - about, say, the objective
world, God, causation, platonic forms - is just as
foregone and familiar as my well-known novel.
The one difference is that the philosopher gives us
in pretty volumes the intermediary stages of his
work, while I have chosen to destroy mine.' In fact,
not a single draft page remains to bear witness to
Menard's many years of toil.

The first method he devised was relatively simple.
To learn Spanish well, to return to the Catholic
faith, to fight the Moor and Turk, to forget
European history from 1602 to 1918, to be Miguel
de Cervantes. This was the course Pierre Menard
embarked upon (I know he gained a fair command
of seventeenth-century Spanish), but he rejected
the method as too easy. Too impossible, rather!
the reader will say. Granted, but the scheme was
impossible from the start, and of all the impossible
ways of achieving his aim this was the least
interesting. To be in the twentieth century a popular
novelist of the seventeenth century seemed to
him a belittlement. To be, however possible, Cervantes and to come to Don Quixote seemed less
exacting - therefore less interesting - than to stay
Pierre Menard and come to Don Quixote through
the experience of Pierre Menard. (This conviction,
let me add, made him leave out the autobiographical
prologue to the second part of Don Quixote.
To have retained this prologue would have been
to create another character - Cervantes - and would
also have meant presenting Don Quixote through
this character and not through Menard. Naturally,
Menard denied himself this easy way out.) 'In essence,
my scheme is not difficult,' I read in another
part of his letter. 'To carry it through all I need is to
be immortal.' Should I confess that I often find
myself thinking that he finished the book and that
I read Don Quixote - all of Don Quixote - as if it
had been Menard's brainchild? A few nights ago,
leafing through chapter twenty-six, which he never
tried his hand at, I recognized our friend's style
and voice in this fine phrase: 'the nymphs of the
streams, the damp and doleful Echo....' This effective
coupling of a moral and a physical adjective
brought back to me a line of Shakespeare's that
Menard and I talked about one evening:

Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk ...

But why Don Quixote? our reader will ask. For
a Spaniard such a choice would have been understandable;
not, however, for a Symbolist poet from
Nîmes, an ardent follower of Poe, who begat
Baudelaire, who begat Valéry, who begat Edmond
Teste. The letter quoted above sheds light on the
point. 'Don Quixote', explains Menard, 'interests
me deeply but does not seem to me - how can I
put it? - inevitable. While I find it hard to imagine
a world without Edgar Allan Poe's interjection,

Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!

or without the Bateau ivre or the Ancient
Mariner, I am quite able to imagine it without
Don Quixote. (Of course, I am talking about my
own ability and not about the historical resonance
of these works.) Don Quixote is an incidental
book; Don Quixote is not necessary. I can therefore
plan the writing of it - I can write it - without
the risk of tautology. I read it from cover to cover
when I was about twelve or thirteen. Since then,
I have carefully reread certain chapters - those that
for the moment I shall not try my hand at. I have
also delved into Cervantes's one-act farces, his
comedies, Galatea, the exemplary novels, the all-too
laboured Travails of Persiles and Segismunda,
and the Voyage to Parnassus. My overall recollection of Don Quixote, simplified by forgetfulness and
lack of interest, is much like the hazy outline of a
book one has before writing it. Given this outline
(which can hardly be denied me), it goes without
saying that my problem is somewhat more difficult
than the one Cervantes faced. My obliging forerunner,
far from eschewing the collaboration of chance,
went about writing his immortal work in something
of a devil-may-care spirit, carried along by the inertial
force of language and invention. I have taken
upon myself the mysterious duty of reconstructing
his spontaneous novel word for word. My solitary
game is governed by two contradictory rules. The
first allows me to try out variations of a formal or
psychological nature; the second makes me sacrifice
these variations to the original text while finding
solid reasons for doing so. To these assumed
obstacles we must add another - an inbuilt one. To
compose Don Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth
century was reasonable, necessary, and
perhaps even predestined; at the beginning of the
twentieth century, however, it is well-nigh impossible.
Three centuries, packed with complex events,
have not passed without effect. One of these events
was Don Quixote itself.'

In spite of this trio of obstacles, Menard's fragmentary
Don Quixote is subtler than that of Cervantes. Cervantes sets up a crude contrast between
the fantasy of the chivalric tale and the tawdry
reality of the rural Spain he knew, whereas Menard
chooses as his reality the land of Carmen during
the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega. What
picturesque touches would this not have suggested
to a Maurice Barrès or a Dr Rodríguez Larreta!
Menard, with complete unselfconsciousness,
avoids the least hint of exoticism. We find in his
work no gypsydom, no conquistadores, no mystics,
no Philip II, no burnings at the stake. He does
away with local colour. This disdain hints at a new
treatment of the historical novel. This disdain is
an outright condemnation of Salammbô.

If we examine isolated chapters we are equally
astonished. Let us, for example, look into chapter
thirty-eight of part one, 'in which don Quixote
gives a strange discourse on arms and letters.' We
all know that don Quixote (like Quevedo in an
analogous later passage from his Hora de todos)
finds for arms over letters. Cervantes was an old
soldier; his finding is understandable. But that the
don Quixote of Pierre Menard, a contemporary
of La trahison des clercs and of Bertrand Russell,
should relapse into such fuzzy sophistry! Madame
Bachelier sees this as the author subordinating himself
in an admirable and characteristic way to the mentality of his hero; others, showing not the slightest
perceptiveness, see only a transcription of Don
Quixote; the Baroness of Bacourt sees the influence
of Nietzsche. To this third view (which I consider
beyond dispute) I wonder if I dare add a fourth,
which accords quite well with Pierre Menard's all
but divine modesty - his self-effacing or ironic habit
of propagating ideas that were the exact reverse of
those he himself held. (Let us once more remember
his diatribe against Paul Valéry in Jacques Reboul's
short-lived super-realist pages.) Cervantes's text and
Menard's are identical as to their words, but the second
is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his
detractors will claim, but the ambiguity is itself a
richness.)

It is a revelation to compare Menard's Don
Quixote with Cervantes's. The latter, for example,
wrote (part one, chapter nine):

... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse
of great deeds, witness to the past, example and
admonition to the present, warning to the future.

Written in the seventeenth century, written by
the 'lay genius' Cervantes, this catalogue is no more
than a rhetorical eulogy to history. Menard, on the
other hand, writes:

... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse
of great deeds, witness to the past, example and
admonition to the present, warning to the future.

History, the 'mother' of truth; the idea is breathtaking.
Menard, the contemporary of William
James, does not define history as an enquiry into
reality but as its source. To him historic truth is not
what actually took place, it is what we think took
place. The last two phrases - 'example and admonition
to the present, warning to the future' - are
shamelessly pragmatic.

As vivid is the contrast in styles. Menard's, deliberately
archaic - he was a foreigner, after all - is
prone to certain affectations. Not so the style of
his forerunner, who uses the everyday Spanish of
his time with ease.

There is no intellectual exercise which in the
end is not pointless. A philosophical tenet is at the
outset a true description of the world; with the
passage of time it becomes no more than a chapter - perhaps only a paragraph or a name - in the
history of philosophy. In literature this eventual
withering away is even plainer. Don Quixote,
Menard once told me, was first and foremost an
entertaining book; now it has become a pretext for patriotic toasts, grammatical arrogance, and obscene
de luxe editions. Fame is a form of
incomprehension - perhaps the worst.

There is nothing new in such nihilistic conclusions;
what is unusual is the resolve that Pierre
Menard derived from them. Determined to rise
above the emptiness that awaits all man's endeavours,
he embarked upon a task that was extremely
complex and, even before it began, futile. He devoted
his utmost care and attention to reproducing,
in a language not his own, a book that already
existed. He wrote draft after draft, revising
assiduously and tearing up thousands of manuscript
pages.*** He never let anyone see them and
took pains to ensure they did not survive him. I
have tried without success to reconstruct them.

It seems to me that the 'final' Don Quixote can
be looked on as a kind of palimpsest in which traces - faint but still decipherable - of our friend's 'earlier'
writing must surely shine through. Unfortunately,
only a second Pierre Menard, working his way back over the pages of the first one, would be capable of
digging up and restoring to life those lost Troys.

'To think, to analyse, to invent,' Menard also
wrote to me, 'far from being exceptional acts are
the way the intelligence breathes. To glorify one
particular instance of this action, to store as treasure
the ancient thoughts of others, to recollect in
amazed disbelief what the doctor universalis
thought is to admit to our own indolence and
crudeness. Every man should be capable of all
ideas, and I believe that in the future he will.'

Through a new technique, using deliberate
anachronisms and false attributions, Menard (perhaps
without trying to) has enriched the static,
fledgling art of reading. Infinite in its possibilities,
this technique prompts us to reread the Odyssey as if it came after the Aeneid and Madame Henri
Bachelier's book The Centaur's Garden as if it were
written by Madame Henri Bachelier. The technique
fills the mildest of books with adventure. To attribute
The Imitation of Christ to Louis Ferdinand
Céline or to James Joyce - would this not be a
satisfactory renewal of its subtle spiritual lessons?

Nîmes, 1939

*Madame Henri Bachelier also lists a literal translation of
Quevedo's literal translation of St Francis of Sales's Introduction
à la vie dévote. No trace of this work is to be found in Pierre
Menard's library. The ascription must have arisen from something
our friend said in jest, which the lady misunderstood.

**I had a secondary purpose as well - to sketch a portrait
of Pierre Menard. But dare I compete with the gilded pages that I am told the Baroness of Bacourt is preparing, or with Carolus
Hourcade's delicate, precise pencil?

***I remember his notebooks with their square-ruled pages,
the heavy black deletions, the personal system of symbols
he used for marginal emendations, and his minute handwriting.
He liked to stroll through the outskirts of Nîmes at
sunset, often taking along a notebook with which he would
make a cheerful bonfire.